• Interactive: Bill Tracker for the 83rd Session: Bill filing for the 83rd legislative session kicked off on Monday, and lawmakers filed more than 250 bills on the first day alone. The Tribune has retooled last session's bill tracker and put it to work, pulling in all the legislation that's been filed so far for 2013.

• UT System May Construct $100 Million Austin Office: "The University of Texas System Board of Regents will meet this week and consider, among many things, whether to approve the construction of a system office building in downtown Austin that is projected to cost $102,417,000."

• Austin progressives petition White House to secede from Texas (The Daily Caller): "The dueling White House petitions may have just jumped the shark. 'Caleb M' from Austin, Texas — the White House doesn’t divulge last names — has launched a petition with the Obama administration to sever ties between Texas and its liberal-leaning capital city if the state were permitted to secede from the United States."

• What Polls Say About the Probability of Texas Turning Purple (TM Daily Post): "One thing that is clear from this year’s elections is that Republicans don’t need to win the Hispanic vote to win an election, even in a majority-minority state like Texas. They just need to stop losing it so aggressively."

• Exit polls skip Texas, missing key demographic data (The Washington Examiner): "Certainly, there are many states where this money-saving omission makes sense. But by omitting Texas, even while polling in politically settled states like Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, the exit pollsters pre-emptively missed the biggest story of the election — the continued shift of Hispanic voters back toward Democrats since the George W. Bush era."

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